Lagos Congress: My Experience/Candid Opinion – Segun Adewale (Aeroland)

Lagos State PDP Congress has come and gone but scars of injustice that characterized the congress rages on until justice is appropriately served. I will rather prefer a truthful account of what really transpired to avert future recurrence and to forestall repeating same mistakes over time to get same results repeatedly.

It is a fact that with the Chairman of the electoral committee for the congress, Governor Diri party faithful and delegates had their hopes high to have a United Lagos PDP poised to reposition the party prior to 2023 general elections, most especially in Lagos.

This is very paramount in view of the yearnings of the people to vote out the ruling party APC, given its notoriety and deceitful style of governance.

Earlier Governor Diri assured all delegates and party faithful of a very peaceful Congress devoid of rancour.  Prior to that time accreditation had commenced at a different venue, but were barely able to conclude about five Local Governments, when the owners of the hall sent everyone packing, on the grounds that the hall and neighbourhood was getting overcrowded and could constitute breach of security  in the area.

Having left the initial venue, some of the remaining delegates moved to the congress arena which was about 5km from the initial accreditation center.

On getting to the voting center, the congress Chairman was able to calm all frayed nerves  and insisted he will prefer to adopt the unity list to avert rancour. We all waited patiently for the agreed harmonised list to be read. Before we knew it, the hall was almost empty. In fact, those who were previously mobilizing all our delegates relaxed having been assured the unity list will be read to affirm consensus.

In total display of humour, the chairman while giving his opening address to delegates said those who won’t allow consensus, “holy ghost fire should consume them”.

In all honesty I also left for my office thinking the agreed list will eventually be read and all will just be fine, not until they started calling me that accreditation had started again  and election was ongoing at the same time.

We had to start calling delegates who had left the venue to start coming back so that they can vote.

To be candid, I have never seen such level of confusion in my entire political career and either it was on purpose or not still remains a mystery yet to be uncovered.

To worsen and make the election invalid, the electoral chairman sorted and announced the position of the Chairman, Deputy Chairman, Secretary and Woman leader only, then H.E, Diri lead electoral committee stopped counting others and the announcements brought to a halt as other elective positions were neither counted nor announced.

We tried  prevailing on the chairman to count other ballots to enable the committee declare the winners but to no avail. We even made suggestions that since the elective congress requires some level of education as the delegates may have to write the names of the candidate they are voting before the vote is cast, it is possible that the votes for the right person is cast into a wrong box since some of the delegates can neither write nor read, some were even aided to vote their choice candidate, all yielded no result and all our suggestions were ignored.

The chairman didn’t bother checking ballot papers that might have been mixed or deposited wrongly in another boxes as we later discovered 62 votes for Fawole were wrongly deposited.

As if this was not enough, the congress committee members left the venue of the congress by announcing only 4 officers, as earlier stated above while the Deputy Chairman (National) SW, Soji Adagunodo was left behind and instructed to bring the remaining ballot boxes to Abuja for collation. How on earth can you conduct election in Lagos and take the ballots papers and boxes to Abuja to count? Meanwhile, the South west chairman was not even a member of the congress electoral committee.

He only came in his personal capacity to observe the congress and has no constitutional role to play in the congress. How can you now saddle such a person with the responsibility of bringing ballot boxes to Abuja for collation and counting.

It is really baffling to see all manners of names flying around the social media today claiming to be winners of the elective congress when in actual fact, only 4 names were announced controversially at the venue of the congress.

In as much as we will allow peace to reign for the sake of the party and the stakeholders, we will not allow illegality to stand. We know those who have been jubilating without being declared winners belong to the Deji Doherty group, but they should be kind enough to respect the party by remaining calm and peaceful while they wait for the party to declare the results.

Also, if justice is not done, it will be highly unfair to those who had left the venue of the congress as they were technically disenfranchised by the chairman of the congress, owing to his confusing pronouncements which made people to leave the venue earlier than they planned. It’s unethical to  shift the goal post in the middle of the game.

In the light of this, it will amount to justice well served to the entire PDP members in Lagos to declare the congress inconclusive, with a view to serving out justice to those who were disenfranchised and to also harmonize the other elective positions, yet to be announced or set off a new date for an all inclusive elective congress.